Elisha Russ-Fishbane is an historian of Jewish life and culture of the medieval Islamic world. He arrives at Princeton as a Tikvah Post-Doctoral Fellow after completing his doctorate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His dissertation, entitled Between Politics and Piety: The Life and Leadership of Abraham Maimonides, is an historical portrait of thirteenth-century Egyptian Jewish society through the life and times of its foremost communal leader. Before coming to Harvard, Elisha studied Classics at the University of Chicago, Yiddish at Oxford University, and Latin at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
Elisha’s historical interests focus on the socio-economic, religious, and intellectual intersections of medieval Judaism and Islam. His current areas of research explore the history and development of the Jewish pietist movement in Egypt, also called the Jewish-Sufi movement, and the cultural contacts between Arab and European Jewries in the medieval and early modern periods. In addition to teaching at Harvard, Elisha has taught in a variety of adult education programs, including the Me’ah program based at Hebrew College in Newton, MA.
Oded Schechter's work focuses on early modern and modern philosophy, late interpretations of the Talmud, Modern Jewish philosophy, and Modern Jewish Political Thought. His former and current work, and his manuscripts include: The Philosophy of Salomon Maimon, The Genealogy of Hebrew as a Political-Ontological Struggle, Spinoza’s Ontology and Political Thought. He is currently focusing on Critique of Secularism, and the Core of the Absolute after Auschwitz.
Oded Schechter’s education includes years of studies in Ultra-Orthodox Yeshivas in Bnei-Brak and Jerusalem. He studied philosophy towards his MA degree at the interdisciplinary program for excellent students and Cohn Institute for History and Philosophy of Sciences and Ideas at Tel Aviv University, and toward his PhD at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he worked on Spinoza philosophy. Oded was a postdoc EMUE fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Among his teaching positions, he served as an assistant professor at Potsdam University, and as collegiate assistant professor and Harper & Schmidt fellow at the University of Chicago.
Professor Schechter and Professor Russ-Fishbane join the Tikvah Project as 2009-2010 Post-Doctoral Fellows
Allan Arkush is Professor of Judaic Studies and History at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He holds degrees from Cornell University, the Jewish Theological Seminary and Brandeis University. He is the author of Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment and co-editor of Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism, Essays in Memory of Alexander Altmann. His numerous essays on modern Jewish thought and Zionism have appeared in Modern Judaism, Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Quarterly Review, Polity and other periodicals and books. He is the translator of Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalemand Gershom Scholem’s Origins of the Kabbalah. Professor Arkush has been a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a Starr Fellow at Harvard University. Since 2006 he has been the editor of AJS Perspectives, the magazine of the Association for Jewish Studies.
Professor Arkush joins the Tikvah Project as the 2009-2010 Research Fellow